The allure of recurring revenue combined with low interest rates and investors prospecting for new assets are contributing to a potentially prosperous time for sellers of merchant portfolios. That’s the assessment from a presentation Tuesday at the Southeast Acquirers Association annual conference in New Orleans. Also, the Electronic Transactions Association …

The newest market for payments may one day lie inside a more than 100-year-old machine: the car. Just as payments is evolving to incorporate watches and fitness trackers, so too are futurists looking at how payments might make the move to cars. Jacksonville, Fla.-based Fidelity National Information Services Inc. is …

  Criminals have developed a new family of point-of-sale malware that hides in plain sight, riding along with core processes inside Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system, says Chicago-based Trustwave Holdings Inc., which uncovered the malware during a recent U.S. Secret Service investigation. Dubbed “Punkey” because of the “unkey” command within its …

Independent sales organization CoCard Anderson and bill-payment software company Systems East Inc. are targeting insurance, government, and utilities merchants in a new program announced Tuesday. Merchant processing is not as widely adopted in these merchant categories as in retail, making them attractive prospects, CoCard says. In the deal, Systems East, …

Up against determined competition from big technology companies, financial institutions have always reassured themselves that they still have an edge in payments when it comes to consumer trust. Now, that edge appears to be eroding fast. On the question of consumer trust, banks and financial institutions are losing ground to …

Debit-rewards programs offered by banks appear to be rebounding a little, with younger consumers more motivated than other age groups to use them. That’s according to a new report from payments-research firm Mercator Advisory Group Inc. Debit rewards programs fell out of favor with banks following passage of the Durbin …

  Card-linked offers appear to be gaining consumer favor, according to results of a survey from the CardLinx Association, a Burlingame, Calif.-based trade group. Over the past 12 months, consumer use of card-linked offers increased 92%, the association said. It surveyed more than 50 companies. Other survey results show 95% …

Point-of-sale terminal maker Ingenico Group and chip-maker Intel Corp. will work on producing a tablet that supports EMV chip card and near-field communication (NFC) transactions, Ingenico announced Thursday. The tablet is in response to the U.S. payment card migration to the EMV chip card standard, and the growing adoption of …

Mobile point-of-sale service developer CardFlight Inc. will make an EMV chip card-compatible mobile POS reader available in the second quarter, in anticipation of the Oct. 1 liability shift. That’s the date card fraud at the point of sale is scheduled to shift to the party least prepared for it. The …

Merchants face relentless and ever-changing attempts to make fraudulent online transactions, but measuring the effectiveness of rules in place to counter those attempts takes time. Now, CyberSource, a unit of Visa Inc., is offering a service called Decision Manager Replay that lets merchants test various anti-fraud measures for online transactions …